Sara J Kerr

An Accidental Programmer Exploring 19thC Literature

September marked the half way point of my PhD. So, as it is time to get things organised and focus on writing, I have decided to write a series of posts about my workflow. This is partly to help me clarify and streamline my processes, but also in case it is of use to anyone …

In September, I presented a paper which discussed the application of vector space models to a corpus of Jane Austen’s published novels at the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities Conference in Tokyo. The paper was titled ‘Jane Austen in Vector Space: Applying vector space models to 19th century literature’ and outlined some of the findings …

GST 1 is a module at Maynooth University which aims to improve research skills and employability. To gain 5 ECTS for this module you need to attend 6 sessions and produce a diary entry or set of notes for each one. Author Seminar: Scientific Journals, Peer Review and How to Write a Great Research Paper …

Possibly the most common entry level visualisation in computational textual analysis is the word cloud. There are multiple online tools (the best known probably being Wordle) which allow you to create them in all sorts of styles. A word cloud can be very useful for identifying frequent terms at a glance, or to indicate possible …

An ongoing social media presence is an important part of many crowdsourced humanities projects. This can be used to promote the project, engage a wider range of contributors and provide a channel for collaboration between academics and other interested parties. Planning and Hosting a Twitter Chat Leading on from my previous blog post which explored …

The Letters of 1916 project is the first public humanities project in Ireland. Its purpose is to provide a snapshot of ‘a year in a life’ in Ireland between 1st November 1915 and 31st October 1916. This is a period which covers the 1916 Rising as well as several major events in World War I …

In this second blog post on the Marine Lives Three Silver Ships project, (see the first post here) I look at how to identify the folio pages in the HCA 13/70 Depositions which mention the three ships (Salvador, Sampson and Saint George). Processing and Calculating Raw Frequencies Using the .txt file downloaded in the last …

Within the larger Marine Lives project there are a number of smaller sub-projects which focus on specific areas of interest. One of these smaller projects is the Three Silver Ships project: The purpose of the project is to identify relevant references to cases involving the Three Silver Ships in the various depositions and papers and …

Marine Lives is a digital project to transcribe Admiralty court records dating from the 1650s. The project site is a wiki which enables transcribers to work collaboratively. The British Library has invited the project to be part of the UK Web Archive. The Marine Lives Wiki can be found here. The Summer Training programme is …

It seems rather strange to think that, just under eight months ago, I had not written any computer code (I’m not including little bits of BASIC from the ’80s), and yet lines of code or the blinking cursor of Terminal no longer instil a sense of rising panic. Although programming has a very steep learning …